Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante Read Free Book Online Page B

many books, until it came naturally, and I sat there with a pencil and a long tablet, and tried to write, until I felt I could not go on because the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart.

Chapter Ten
    Not a week passed without a letter from my mother. Written on lined grade-school paper they reflected her fears, her hopes, her anxiety, and her curious view of what went on in the world. They bothered me, those letters. Their phrasing fluttered in my head like trapped birds, flapping about at the most inopportune times. Often I simply laughed at them, other times they angered and frustrated me and I pitied my poor innocent mother:
    Be careful, Arturo. Say your prayers. Remember that one Hail Mary to the Virgin Mary will get you anything. Wear your scapular medal. It was blessed by Father Agatha, a very holy man. Thank God you all have one….
    Joe Santucci, my high school buddy next door, had completed a tour in the navy and was now back in Boulder again. My mother wrote:
    Poor Mrs. Santucci. Her boy is back after three years and he is a communist. She asked me to pray for him. Such a nice boy. I talked to him this morning and I couldn’t believe he was a communist. He seems just the same….
    Please send us some money when you can. Our grocery bill is $390. I pay cash now, but there isn’t enough and your father hasn’t worked for two weeks….
    I miss you all the time. I found a pair of your socks with holes in them, and darned them and started to cry. Say your prayers. I went to mass this morning and offered communion for your good luck….
    Joe Santucci told Papa about Los Angeles. He says the women are bad and all over and there are saloons every place. Wear your scapular medal for protection. Go to mass, try to meet some nice Catholic girls….
    I am glad you are working in the restaurant, and the other job with the writer. Send me some money if you can. Your father hurt his hand and can’t work for a while. We miss you. Try a novena. Nobody ever said a novena without getting help….
    I sent her $200 from my first studio paycheck and eventually paid off the grocery bill.

Chapter Eleven
    Mrs. Brownell and I were experiencing some turbulence. She had doubts about my working in the studio, and was careful not to question me about it. We were silent together during long periods, and it was difficult to invent small talk. Sitting before the radio we listened to Jack Benny and Bob Hope and Fred Allen until it was time to go to bed. We lay in the darkness and stared at the ceiling until sleep came. I felt far away from her, a drifting away as the strangeness developed. She was cold and silent in the morning, the gap widening. It was coming, and I knew it, a separation, a break. I told myself I didn’t care. I was working, I had money. I didn’t have to stay in that ancient hotel. I could move to Hollywood now, into the Hollywood hills. I could rent my own house and even hire a cleaning woman. Bunker Hill was not forever. A man had to move on.
    Thinking of her depressed me. I sat in my office and squirmed, thinking how old she was, five years older than my own mother, and I gagged, and tried to cough away the unpleasantness. I thought of her face, the little lines around her eyes, the cables in her neck, the crinkled skin of her arms, her old body, the buttocks too small, her dresses too long, the crack of her knees when she sat down, her sunken cheeks when she removed her dentures, her cold feet, her old Kansas ways. I didn’t need it, I told myself. I had only to turn my back to make it go away. I could have any girl in town, any starlet, maybe even a star. All I had to do was apply myself. It was wrongto spend my best years with an old woman who gave me only old thoughts in return. I needed a bright and lovely creature familiar with the arts, steeped in literature, someone who loved Keats and Rupert Brooke and Ernest Dowson. Not a woman who got her literary